Every Christmas, I spend it under your tree. I usually stay there for a New Year’s Eve or a night, depending on your “team”, sometimes longer. For me, it’s the wrapping paper. And even if I’m not the exclusive type, since we also meet on your birthday, Christmas is not the same without me. Who makes eyes shine with gluttony in advance? Who maintains the suspense and raises the blood pressure at the fateful moment? Who gets torn apart without more ceremony by your trembling fingers? Me.
So it was time for me to tell my story. As the art historian tells Marielle Brie on her blog, I arrive in your homes in the 19th century with my fir, ball and log friends. At first, I was all white or in kraft paper, before adorning myself with patterns and shimmering colors over the course of the 20th century. Shapes, textures, composition… I am constantly evolving, in particular thanks to specialized companies such as the Beaumont group. In this company of 70 employees, “we create collections that we sell to our customers, and we also adapt to certain constraints for personalized creations”, tells Sindy Pierre, collection and communication manager, to a journalist from 20 minutes.
From reel to spokes
Once the design has been imagined by Sindy Pierre and her colleagues, I arrive at their factory in the form of “large spools of white raw material”, made in Europe. There, I can come to life by two processes: either rotogravure, “with a chromed and engraved cylinder”, or by flexography, when “a polymer plate deposits the ink on the paper”. More than 100,000 km are thus printed each year in Vienne. True “core business” of Beaumont, since the Christmas period represents nearly 80% of their production, I am pampered, receiving only “100% water-based, solvent-free” inks. The company is increasingly developing recycled media, such as “grass particle krafts”, or “directly dyed, double-sided black paper”. And for 2023, I will be available in a “hemp grown in the Paris region, with paper printed near Lake Geneva” version. An invitation to travel all by myself.
Once shipped, I then go into the hands of wholesalers or directly into supermarkets and merchants. This is how at Fnac, you can find me in a tube, to make your packages yourself, or in large rolls at the end of the checkouts, where associations will take care of making me enhance your gifts. At the Sevezan bookstore in Levallois-Peret, I would rather go into the expert hands of the boss Jocelyn Sevezan: all year round, he makes “a dozen packages a week”, enough to talk about before December “around 400 gift packages”. “It’s part of the job, with the helping hand it comes quite quickly,” he says.
The reusable packaging boom
A few streets further on, it’s even easier for Sophie Ogel, in the Jeff de Bruges chocolate factory. The parent company provides her with rigid recycled paper bags in the brand’s colors all year round, and “a different model for Christmas”, white with a golden pattern, which she lines with a thin sheet of red paper. Besides, many of you, poor packers or driven by other considerations, abandon me in favor of the bag. Like Maud, reader of 20 minutes, who “buys nice gift bags for her kids.” She can thus “keep them for the following years” and “easily see who the gift was planned for at the last moment”. A “practical, economical and ecological” tip for the mother.
She makes amends by employing me for the other members of the family, taking care to “customize” me, for example “with sprigs of fir and holly.” Isabelle opted for a more artisanal version, making “bags of all sizes from old flags recovered from garage sales”. Not so far from furoshiki, my competitor in Japanese fabric for which Frances opted. At least they don’t end up ripped into a thousand pieces.